Unless Chrome has features you can't survive without (and I admit its dev tools are pretty good), then I don't see the purpose of this.
If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified.
This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't remember, but IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an excellent browser compared with its competition. Market dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does not matter much for as long as Google controls its implementation and distribution.
Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.
Now don't get me wrong, it is true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that doesn't matter that much, because they can always turn and you can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors — like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating pining.
They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost battles after they ended up in Chrome.
> Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.
I just love that the web community actually thinks about this, and actively works to avoid monopolization and nonstandard behavior on the different browsers.
Recently, I have moved into desktop development (using Qt and GTK+), and it is atrocious just how difficult it is to deploy a non-trivially sized native application on the three common operating systems. I really wish that the desktop development community could have unified around a similar set of standards for all the OSes when it comes to desktop applications too.
The web application platform is painful in several ways too, but I think they have nailed it with attention to standards compliance and weeding-out monopolistic behavior
As someone that has been doing desktop development since the MS-DOS/Amiga days, and is quite happy to only touch Web development when obliged to do so, I wonder what those problems are.
Without knowing what the parent really intended, I assumed they were talking about the difficulty of deploying the same application across platforms rather than with desktop development on any single platform.
Different system libraries, different window management environments and user expectations for layout and interaction, different handling of hi-dpi displays, different filesystems with different filename restrictions and different handling of filename encodings, different application packaging, different code signing and sandboxing requirements, different package distribution mechanisms. I've probably missed a few, but those cover some memorable enough annoyances for me in recent years.
I don't enjoy web development, but I do enjoy web publication and distribution.
If staying free of Google becomes a goal, then by using Chrome you're still helping them, even if your Chrome is un-googlified.
This is because you help Chrome become a monopoly in the marketplace, I view it as the new Internet Explorer already. Many people here probably don't remember, but IExplorer also won on technical merits, version 5 being an excellent browser compared with its competition. Market dominance that allowed Microsoft to screw the web for a decade at least. And no, in this context its open source nature does not matter much for as long as Google controls its implementation and distribution.
Firefox is right now truly the best browser, at least for my usage patterns and needs, but even if it weren't, I would still use it, because when web standards are endangered due to a monopoly, then I consider it my duty to support the underdog.
Now don't get me wrong, it is true that Google and Chrome have helped the open web. But that doesn't matter that much, because they can always turn and you can see how lately Chrome is making bold changes without waiting confirmation from W3C or the other browser vendors — like disabling forms auto-complete or deprecating certificating pining.
They are at a point where Chrome has enough market share to implement whatever the heck they want. DRM? H.264? Lost battles after they ended up in Chrome.